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Old 01-11-2008, 09:22 AM   #39 (permalink)
loquitur
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There is another aspect to the public policy question that isn't being addressed here much. Voter fraud, or the perception of voter fraud, is corrosive. It's not merely that the elections have to be clean - the process must be seen as being clean. People have to have confidence in it. The FL vote in 2000 did enormous damage to democracy because it caused people to lose confidence in the system - justifiably, because the system was a mess, and sometimes you need a crisis before problems get addressed.

But each person who votes has a right to expect that the process is clean, that only qualified voters vote, that each vote gets counted only once. If that is not true, it injures every single voter.

That means the case weighs two kinds of harm against each other: (1) the risk that some voter somewhere who is otherwise qualified might be turned away from the polls for lack of ID; and (2) the systemic harm to every voter from having a system without adequate and obvious safeguards. Usually, in a democracy we rely on our elected representatives to make this balance.

As a matter of constitutional law, I would expect that is what will decide the case. Note that that has nothing to do with whether I personally believe item 1 or item 2 is more important. The issue is whether the legislature of a state is entitled to make that choice.
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